"Pundits should have fixed terms,” left-wing author Naomi Klein recently told the BBC. Awarded “jobs for life,” most professional commentators — whether opining in newspaper columns like this one or blathering on television — suffer no consequence for making predictions that turn out “spectacularly wrong.” Klein’s (partly tongue-in-cheek) solution? Hold our pundits to account by making them reapply for their sinecures every four years, banishing those whose prognostications prove most wide of the mark. The socialist Klein’s embrace of market forces, however selective, is welcome. Might I offer the unfolding horror in Venezuela as the first litmus test

President Trump’s approval rating is at 38 percent. His base is said to be eroding. Average approval of the Republican-controlled Congress is at 16 percent. And the president is at war with his party’s leaders. For Democrats, what’s not to like? The answer isn’t as obvious as it might sound. Trump and the Republicans have concluded one of the least productive first six months of a new presidency. No signature piece of legislation has reached the president’s desk, and the notable failure to enact a health-care bill stands as an indictment against both the president and GOP congressional leaders.

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. (AP) -- Hundreds of people chanted, threw punches, hurled water bottles and unleashed chemical sprays on each other Saturday after violence erupted at a white nationalist rally in Virginia. At least one person was arrested. Gov. Terry McAuliffe declared a state of emergency, and police dressed in riot gear ordered people at the rally in Charlottesville to disperse after chaotic clashes between white nationalists and counter-protesters. Small bands of protesters who showed up to express their opposition to the rally were seen marching around the city peacefully by midafternoon, chanting and waving flags.

Some White House and Republican officials are exploring the idea of putting West Virginia Democratic Senator Joe Manchin in charge of the Energy Department, according to four people familiar with the discussions, a move that could boost President Donald Trump’s stalled legislative agenda. If Manchin were offered and accepted the position, that would allow West Virginia’s Governor Jim Justice -- a newly minted Republican -- to appoint a GOP successor and bring the party a vote closer in the Senate to being able to repeal Obamacare. The idea is in the early stages of consideration, and it’s unclear whether it has

Late last month, the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Dan Coats called North Korea’s nuclear weapons program a “potential existential threat to the United States.” Coats hedges a bit by throwing in the modifier “potentially,” but he has spoken this way before. Unless he has spectacular secret information, this is woefully inaccurate. North Korea is a growing threat to the United States with its nuclear missile program, and it is indeed an existential threat to South Korea and Japan. But the threat Pyongyang poses to the United States is not actually existential as, for example, Russian and Chinese nuclear arsenals

"Pundits should have fixed terms,” left-wing author Naomi Klein recently told the BBC. Awarded “jobs for life,” most professional commentators — whether opining in newspaper columns like this one or blathering on television — suffer no consequence for making predictions that turn out “spectacularly wrong.” Klein’s (partly tongue-in-cheek) solution? Hold our pundits to account by making them reapply for their sinecures every four years, banishing those whose prognostications prove most wide of the mark. The socialist Klein’s embrace of market forces, however selective, is welcome. Might I offer the unfolding horror in Venezuela as the first litmus test

These are dangerous days for Stephen Bannon, President Trump’s brain. A new book about the White House chief strategist portrays the president as the empty vessel into which Mr. Bannon poured his ideology and agenda, propelling the two of them into the White House. The book, “Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency,” by Joshua Green, a reporter who has known Mr. Bannon for years, is a best seller that gives Mr. Trump second billing. That’s made the empty vessel very angry.

When players get political, it turns out that fans can get political right back. After months of speculation and piles of anecdotal evidence, market-research company J. D. Power has weighed in with real data. After surveying 9,200 fans, researchers found that “national anthem protests were the top reason that NFL fans watched fewer games last season.” The protests were never popular. A September 2016 Reuters poll indicated that a super-majority of 72 percent of Americans believed the protests, led by Colin Kaepernick, were “unpatriotic,” but evidence that his protest had an impact on ratings was spotty, at best.

It’s heartening to see that President Trump’s weeklong, passive-aggressive assault on his own attorney general, Jeff Sessions, has crossed a line even for many of the president’s most stalwart supporters. Rush Limbaugh called Mr. Trump’s behavior “unseemly” on his radio show Monday. Of Mr. Sessions he said, “I hate to see him being treated this way.” Over in the Trump-friendly confines of Fox News, Tucker Carlson said the president’s humiliation of the attorney general was “a useless, self-destructive act,” and Mr. Carlson implored Mr. Trump: “For God’s sake, lay off Jeff Sessions. He’s your friend, one of the very few you

Let’s review a few recent developments. Last week, Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, resigned. This was part of a “White House shakeup” to get the Trump administration back on track. The new communications director, Anthony Scaramucci, would fix the White House’s “messaging problem.” Within 24 hours of Scaramucci’s appointment, the president returned to Twitter and unloaded another torrent of political bombshells, including talking about his power to pardon, even as his attorneys were denying that Donald Trump was thinking about pardoning anyone.

It costs as little as $10 and as much as $10,169 to get the same blood test in California. A lower-back M.R.I. priced at $199 at one Florida clinic goes for $6,221 in San Francisco. A shoulder X-ray can run anywhere between $21 and more than $700 across the United States. In Spain, a 30-day supply of Truvada, which helps prevent H.I.V.-AIDS, costs an average of $559, according to data compiled by the International Federation of Health Plans. In the United States it’s $1,301. In Britain, the average price of an angioplasty is $7,264 versus $31,620 in the United States.

Carrollton, Ga. — Jon Ossoff’s defeat in Georgia’s Sixth Congressional District election on Tuesday wasn’t just a sign that Democrats may have a harder time winning in the Trump era than they had hoped. It is a symptom of a larger problem for the party — a generational and racial divide between a largely secular group of young, white party activists and an older electorate that is more religious and more socially conservative.

Even if the country were to descend into widespread unrest, it wouldn’t look like the unrest of 50 years ago. One month into 1968, the Vietnamese celebrated their new year and the Viet Cong launched its Tet Offensive. The chief of the South Vietnamese national police was photographed executing a captured Viet Cong officer, horrifying viewers across the world. Communist forces rapidly overran most of Hue, and hundreds of U.S. Marines were killed taking it back over the following month.

Fox News´s Kat Timpf slammed President Trump on Tuesday for his "disgusting" press conference in which he again blamed "both sides" for the violence that occurred in Charlottesville, Va., over the weekend, stepping back from his direct condemnation of white supremacist groups a day earlier. "It was one of the biggest messes I’ve ever seen. I can’t believe it happened," said Timpf, a co-host of “The Fox News Specialists.” “It is honestly crazy for me to have to comment on this right now because I’m still in the phase where I am wondering if it was actually real life —

A crowd of ignorant protesters pulled down a bronze Confederate statue that stood before a county government building in Durham, North Carolina — the angry national backlash to the Charlottesville brouhaha over the Robert E. Lee monument. This is not how civil societies operate. And yet this is what the left has brought, and now cheers. What’s next — burning books with offensive content? Burning books written by those who used to own slaves? At the very least, museums will have to go. The problem with revising history based on a standard of “feeling offensive” — as this anti-Confederate craze is rooted — is that someone,

Former presidential candidate and current Republican Ohio Gov. John Kasich may be moving closer to mounting a primary challenge against President Trump in the 2020 election. Sources close to Kasich told Willie Geist of the "Today Show" there is growing a sense of "moral imperative" to run against Trump for the Republican nomination in 2020 following his controversial statements on the deadly protest in Charlottesville, Va. (Tweet) Kasich has long been critical of Trump. On Tuesday, Kasich criticized Trump´s Charlottesville comments, saying "there is no moral equivalency to Nazi sympathizers" following Trump´s tumultuous press conference. Kasich, who lost to Trump

The president of the Alliance for American Manufacturing has resigned from President Trump´s American Manufacturing Council, making him the fifth business leader to do so. “I’m resigning from the Manufacturing Jobs Initiative because it´s the right thing for me to do,” Scott Paul tweeted Tuesday. (Snip) Paul´s exit comes amid backlash over the president´s response to the violence at a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., over the weekend. Paul is joining Kenneth Frazier, the CEO of major pharmaceutical company Merck; Kevin Plank, the CEO of Under Armour; and Brian Krzanich, the CEO of Intel, who all resigned from the president’s

Mitt Romney fired back at President Trump for saying “both sides” were responsible for violence at a white supremacist rally over the weekend, claiming that the two clashing groups were more “morally different universes.” “No, not the same. One side is racist, bigoted, Nazi. The other opposes racism and bigotry. Morally different universes,” Romney tweeted Tuesday. (Tweet) Romney was responding to Trump’s comments Tuesday that “both sides” were to blame for the violence at a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va. on Saturday. Trump drew fire for saying Saturday that "many sides" were to blame for the violence at the

President Trump should have left well enough alone. His Monday denunciation of costumed sheet-wearers and Nazi wanna-bes could have cleared the way for Americans of all stripes to focus their outrage on things that matter more than presidential words. That would be the violence that is infecting our politics and the frightening acceptance of it as the new normal. But Trump’s defiance yesterday is sure to keep the media pot boiling over his rhetoric instead of an ominous reality. Namely, that real protestors don’t carry baseball bats, crowbars and mace. Yet Saturday’s bloody clash in Charlottesville showed that many on

Some House Democrats renewed calls for Congress to impeach President Trump on Tuesday after he resorted to blaming "both sides´ for a violent rally in Charlottesville, Va., this past weekend organized by white nationalist groups. "POTUS is showing signs of erratic behavior and mental instability that place the country in grave danger," said Rep. Jackie Speier, D-Calif., in a tweet Tuesday night. "Time to invoke the 25th Amendment." (Tweet) Rep. Gwen Moore, D-Wis., also called on Republicans to initiate impeachment proceedings against Trump. "As we once again hear Donald J. Trump defend those responsible for the deadly riot in Charlottesville

Trump ignited a political firestorm yesterday during an impromptu press conference in which he said there was "blame on both sides" for the tragic events that occurred in Charlottesville over the weekend. Now, the discovery of a craigslist ad posted last Monday, almost a full week before the Charlottesville protests, is raising new questions over whether paid protesters were sourced by a Los Angeles based "public relations firm specializing in innovative events" to serve as agitators in counterprotests. The ad was posted by a company called "Crowds on Demand" and offered $25 per hour to "actors and photographers"

Evidence is turning up from, of all places, the Southern Poverty Law Center, as well as Breitbart and others, that this character, Jason Kessler, who organized the suspicious and supposed Alt-Right demonstration in Charlottesville, Va. that blew up in everyone´s face, is a cunning lefty holdover from the Occupy Wall Street movement and a former Barack Obama supporter. I smell Soros money, sabotage, and Democrat dirty tricks here. I´ve been suspicious of the nature of the violence at this supposed Alt-Right demonstration since the news first began breaking. It is no secret that radical elements in the Democrat left have

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has weighed in on the weekend´s violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, castigating Donald Trump without naming him. ´We can have no tolerance for an ideology of racial hatred. There are no good neo-nazis,´ McConnell said in a statement. The choice of words, while careful, appeared to push back against Trump´s claim on Tuesday that some ´very fine people´ were among a crowd of white supremacists who rallied in the college town. McConnell´s wife, Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, stood next to Trump on Tuesday as he insisted both sides of the weekend´s clash bore some responsibility for

Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina warned President Trump on Wednesday that his “words are dividing Americans, not healing them” in the wake of the bloody clashes in Virginia that has sparked a national conversation about white supremacists and race. Mr. Graham also vowed that Republicans will “fight back against the idea that the party of Lincoln has a welcome mat out for the David Dukes of the world.” “Through his statements yesterday, President Trump took a step backward by again suggesting there is moral equivalency between the white supremacist neo-Nazis and KKK members who attended the Charlottesville rally and people like

As James Bond’s nemesis Auric Goldfinger famously observed, “Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence. The third time is enemy action.” On Tuesday evening, three prominent Republicans — Senator John McCain, Senator Marco Rubio, and 2012 presidential candidate Mitt Romney — endorsed the left-wing media’s preferred narrative and embraced the masked thugs of Antifa as heroes. McCain and Romney used almost identical language, bending their knees to the media narrative that only two factions were present in Charlottesville during the awful events of last weekend: white supremacist Nazis and “Americans standing up to defy hate and bigotry.”